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  • Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina
  • Karen Ann Faulk
Barbara Sutton , Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, 256 pp.

"Crisis can create openings, cracks through which we can see the structure of society more clearly"(3). Barbara Sutton opens her masterful study on embodiment and modes of femininity in 21st century Argentina with descriptions from the height of the economic and political crisis that shook the country in December 2001. Using this moment as a pivotal focus, Sutton explores the connections between the body, the economy, and political protest, particularly among women. Noting that, "The human cost of many neoliberal market reforms have been intensely somatic, as well as emotional and psychological" (204), she explores the negative physical effects of the crisis while also demonstrating the capacity of women to lie within and resist the " social systems, hegemonic institutions, and circulating ideologies"(6) that structure their lives and possibilities. She argues that, though the crisis had a disciplining effect on the social body, and particularly on women's bodies, this moment also served as an opportunity for women to envision and to work to bring about alternatives [End Page 273] to the prevailing social system. Her calm, matter of fact tone conveys the intensity of the moment without falling into the hype (laudatory or depreciative) that so often accompanies it. While doing so, she effectively manages to show the "workings of converging flows of power" (191), through a careful attention to intersecting issues of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity. Yet though she never fails to capture this complexity, the book remains delightfully readable and thoroughly engaging while making a valuable contribution to the fields of Latin American and gender studies. It is accessible enough to be used with upper-level undergraduates even as it is detailed and complex enough to be essential for specialists in Argentina, a difficult balance which Sutton nonetheless achieves flawlessly.

Though the book revolves around a particular moment, it never succumbs to historical decontextualization. Chapter 1 provides both a theoretical introduction to the body as a site of exploration and an overview of the historical, social, and legal context that are ever-present influences in forming the lives of the women in her study and the social and institutional structures with which they engage. Taking the body as a site of power inscription and contestation, and as a space to yield insights about the interaction between local and global forces, she asks, "What are the continuities and contradictions between women's bodily worlds and hegemonic conceptions of the female body?" (2). In seeking to answer this question, she groups the issues her interviewees raised into five broad themes that form the hub of each of the remaining chapters—the bodily scars of neoliberal globalization (Chapter 2), femininity and appearance (Chapter 3), abortion (Chapter 4), domestic and interpersonal violence (Chapter 5), and the body in social protest (Chapter 6). Throughout, she offers a conception of the body that goes beyond the individual to link the physical, personal body to broader social arrangements in the form of the social body, "acknowledg[ing] the local specific character of individual women's bodies while at the same time seeing them as absorbing and interacting with the extralocal realms" (11). In times of economic crisis, she convincingly argues, these boundaries between individual bodies and larger social body become even more fluid and less clearly delimited.

The chapter on the bodily effects of neoliberal globalization eloquently portrays how human bodies and the economy are intimately connected. Overwork, exhaustion, food insecurity, untreated health problems, and the embodiment of emotions such as stress, fear, and desperation are [End Page 274] all physical consequences of the rising unemployment rates and poverty levels that characterized the aftermath of neoliberal reforms in Argentina. While documenting the "bodily implications of global economic restructuring" (35), Sutton draws attention to the ways that gender and class locations structure these experiences. The pressure put on women to keep up a good appearance and to 'put on a good face' even in the face of dire circumstances is just...

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